Depot vs NativeLink

Depot provides software delivery tools spanning source control, builds, CI runners, sandboxes, caches, and registries. Its container build service is a drop-in replacement for Docker builds, with persistent caching and native x86 and Arm support. Depot CI runs existing GitHub Actions workflows as a programmable, debuggable CI service, while Depot Registry is an OCI-compliant registry for builds, pull-through caching, and other artifacts. Integrations include GitHub Actions, CircleCI, GitLab CI, Google Cloud Build, Travis CI, Bitbucket Pipelines, Buildkite, Jenkins, and AWS CodeBuild. Cache integrations cover Bazel, Go, Gradle, Maven, Pants, sccache, Nx, and Turborepo. Each build and CI run is isolated in a dedicated virtual machine. Depot says communications use TLS and storage is encrypted at rest; it also identifies SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and time-bound, permission-based debugging access. Plans start at $20 a month, billed monthly, with a 7-day trial and no free plan. Developer includes community support; Business includes Slack Connect support.

NativeLink brings remote build caching, remote execution, and observability into a Rust-native platform. Its content-addressed cache deduplicates build artifacts so teams, CI systems, and agents can reuse prior results. Remote execution spreads compilation and tests across worker fleets on AWS, GCP, or bare metal, with GPU, ARM, and Apple Silicon support. Listed build systems include Bazel, Buck2, Siso, Soong, Pants, Goma, BuildStream, and CMake through recc. CI integrations include GitHub Actions, GitLab, Buildkite, and Jenkins; other listed connections include AWS, GCP, Azure, S3, GCS, and Redis. The product also lists integrations with AI coding platforms. It can run as a self-hosted Rust binary. Clients support Linux, macOS, and Windows, while servers support Linux and macOS. The free Open Source tier includes community Slack support. Most of the monorepo uses FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0, but metrics and remote persistent workers are Business Source License modules requiring Enterprise or a separate license for shared production use.